The embodiments disclosed herein relate generally to electronic commerce (e-commerce), and more particularly to tracking e-commerce transactions across multiple client devices that are used to conduct the transactions and provide post sale affiliate referral tracking, affiliate fraud, affiliate attribution, client treatment, or customer quality metrics that are associated with the transactions, affiliates, or customers.
Conventional e-commerce systems facilitate purchase transactions between customers at client devices and vendors that are associated with the e-commerce systems. Conventional e-commerce systems also allow affiliates to advertise vendor products on their websites. These affiliates receive commission from vendors for products purchased by way of the affiliate's website.
Typically, e-commerce systems track affiliate referral to vendor products using cookies (i.e., a HTTP cookie) stored on client devices. The e-commerce systems store a cookie on a client device responsive to a customer using the client device to select a uniform resource locator (URL) link associated with a product that is advertised on an affiliate's web page. The URL link redirects the client device to a vendor's product page which allows the user to purchase the product. The limited size of cookies used by conventional e-commerce systems restricts the amount of information that can be stored in the cookies. Generally, these cookies comprise information about the vendor associated with the product and the affiliate that referred the user to the vendor's product.
When a customer purchases the product, conventional e-commerce systems can determine the affiliate that contributed to the sale of the product by accessing a cookie stored on the client device thereby allowing the affiliate to be compensated accordingly. This technique used by the e-commerce systems for affiliate compensation suffers from several deficiencies. For example, if a customer has disabled the use of cookies on his or her client device, the e-commerce systems cannot determine whether the sale of a product should be attributed to an affiliate because the systems lack the necessary cookie to determine an affiliate that referred the product to the customer that made the purchase transaction.
Furthermore, even if cookies are enabled, a customer may use multiple client devices to purchase a vendor product which can lead to incorrect attribution of the product sale. For example, a customer may use a first client device to visit a product page of a vendor through advertising on an affiliate's website. Accordingly, a cookie is stored on the first client device indicating the vendor associated with the product and the affiliate that referred the product to the customer. However, the customer may not complete the purchase of the product using the first client device. Rather, at a later time the customer may use a second client device to directly access the product page and complete the purchase of the product. Thus, although an affiliate contributed to the purchase transaction, the affiliate is not credited for the transaction because the second client device lacks affiliate information in a cookie stored at the second client device.